Patent Drawings

I remember the first time I saw a blueprint. It was during high school shop class where we learned how to use power tools to make the wooden chairs, tables, and chests shown in blueprints. I was completely confused. The odd paper and blue print, coupled with the liberal use of unfamiliar symbols, dashes and dots, and what appeared to be a mind boggling amount of detail was enough to start me in a cold sweat.

For many people, patent drawings are a lot like that first blueprint I saw. As a static two-dimensional (2D) representation of an operational device which is often complex, they present an immense amount of information on a page. The average person would be hard pressed to interpret them, and in fact, as we’ll learn later, they aren’t supposed to be able to.

We’ve been talking about patent basics in this series of blogs, and we’ll continue that discussion in the following weeks with a concentration on patent drawings. In the meantime, here’s one to ponder. When you look at a patent drawing like the one below, what do you see? What do you think this thing is and what is it supposed to do? We’ll find out next week…